Research on social media visualization in the COVID-19 era

Since the coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak in Wuhan in December 2019 and the World Health Organization's declaration of a pandemic in March 2020, social media platforms have been used by users and governments to create and spread critical information. While governments can produce correct health information for the public to regulate the coronavirus, information generated by users can be opinions or other subjective or inaccurate information, which may include misinformation, rumours, and conspiracy theories. In contrast to a conventional systematic review, bibliometric analysis is a macroscopic method that can quickly extract knowledge and patterns from a massive body of research literature.

A bibliometric analysis, which comprises statistical analysis and visualizing the results of a field's research, was used as the research methodology. Biblioshiny, an open-source program supported by the R environment and offering capabilities for computing performance metrics and the display of various bibliometric networks, was used to conduct the bibliometric investigation. This paper's primary objective is to analyse and provide the research findings on the use of social media for COVID-19 concerns throughout the past three years, specifically from 2020 to 2022. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that combined quantitative and qualitative methodologies to investigate and evaluate a sizable number of research articles, despite the existence of helpful qualitative and systematic reviews.

This investigation found certain papers reported in Section 2 and other studies with similar research themes to the work by. In contrast to earlier studies, the findings of this one point out specific research issues or gaps (such as distance learning education, etc.) that need to be addressed. Bibliometric approaches, which are far quicker and less time-consuming than conventional systematic reviews, were used to identify and summarize the issues of this study. In addition to the subjects, our analysis also yielded findings on publication and citation trends, the most cited sources and articles, the most influential and cited nations, co-citation clusters, and patterns of cross-national cooperation.

The current study's drawback, though, is that all our papers came from the WoS database. This is so that several files from various bibliographic sources, such as Scopus and Google Scholar, can't be combined using the Biblioshiny software. Publications from a variety of sources may provide superior visualization and knowledge results in this situation.

Source: Information